Wagner James Au reports on virtual worlds, VR & Internet culture

Wednesday, December 12, 2018

Watch: Text-to-Speech App for Voice-Free Communicating in High Fidelity

Recent virtual worlds and social VR platforms tend to give more centrality to VOIP over in-world text chat -- a serious design mistake, in my view*. If you use High Fidelity, however, here's a solution: Text to Speech v1.0, now in the HiFi store.

Created by High Fidelity developer Zach Fox, it was inspired, he tells me, "by our desire to give a communication option to users who can't or prefer not to speak in VR. TTS is also a fun communication option to experiment with when hanging out with friends!"

Learning about the API that Windows uses to synthesize speech from text.

Using that API to generate an uncompressed bytestream of speech audio data corresponding to arbitrary text input.

Feeding that bytestream into High Fidelity's Audio Injector functionality so that it could be heard by nearby users in a domain (more on Audio Injectors here.)

Hopefully we'll see some fun use cases for this in livestreaming and meme-making soon!

*Why I think voice chat centrality in virtual worlds/social VR is a bad idea, short version: It tends to break immersion, advantages trolls, impinges on the ability to multitask, and worst of all, disadvantages people who are better writers than speakers, especially the many people who gravitate to virtual worlds as a way to express themselves with less social anxiety and expectations put upon them in offline contexts.